Welcome to the archives of Water Deeply. While we paused regular publication of the site on November 1, 2018,
we are happy to serve as an ongoing public resource on water resilience. We hope you’ll enjoy the reporting
and analysis that was produced by our dedicated community of editors and contributors.

We continue to produce events and special projects while we explore where the on-site journalism goes next.
If you’d like to reach us with feedback or ideas for collaboration you can do so at
partners@newsdeeply.com.

A crew prepares to clear a hot spot at the Blue Cut Fire near Wrightwood, California, August 17, 2016.ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

So far, the 2018 fire season has produced a handful of big fires in California, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado; conflagrations in Oklahoma and Kansas; and a fire bust in Alaska, along with garden-variety wildfires from Florida to Oregon. Some of those fires are in rural areas, some are in wildlands and a few are in exurbs.

Even in a time of new normals, this looks pretty typical. Fire starts are a little below the 10-year running average, and the amount of burned area is running above that average. But no one can predict what may happen in the coming months. California thought it had dodged a bullet in 2017, until a swarm of wildfires in late fall blasted through Napa and Sonoma counties, followed by the Big One – the Thomas Fire, California’s largest on record at the time, in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Every major fire rekindles another round of commentaries about “America’s wildfire problem.” But the fact is that our nation does not have a fire problem. It has many fire problems, and they require different strategies. Some problem fires have technical solutions, some demand cultural calls. All are political.

Here’s one idea: It’s time to rethink firefighting in the geekily labeled wildland-urban interface, or WUI – zones where human development intermingles with forests, grasslands and other feral vegetation.

It’s a dumb name because the boundary is not really an interface but an intermix, in which houses and natural vegetation abut and scramble in an ecological omelet. It’s a dumb problem because we know how to keep houses from burning – but we have had to relearn that in WUI zones, hardening houses and landscaping their communities is the best defense. This is a local task, not a federal one, though the federal agencies have a supporting role and can, and do, help build local capacity.

Homes in Southern California are often closely surrounded by inflammable vegetation, creating extra urgency and work for firefighters – in this case from the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Two Fire Cultures

America is recolonizing rural landscapes everywhere, and fire in the WUI is one outcome. The concept appeared and received its name in Southern California, but has long since spread throughout the West. Some of the worst WUI risks reside in the southeastern United States, though they have mostly remained latent. Then a deadly blaze like the one that blew through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to the fringes of Dollywood in 2016 reveals the full extent of the risk.

Just as development has stirred together built and natural landscapes, it also has juxtaposed two immiscible cultures of fire. Urban and wildland fire agencies are as different as fire hydrants and drip torches.

The mantra of urban fire control is “Learn not to burn.” Every fire is an existential threat to life and property, and the core goal of fire codes is protecting lives. Urban firefighters wear turnout coats, helmets and self-contained breathing apparatus. They pummel fires with water and often operate inside structures.

For wildlands, the central code is “Learn to live with fire.” Firefighters wear hardhats, carry shovels and Pulaskis, and wear bandannas. They work in woods, prairies and chaparral, spray dirt as often as water, and secure perimeters by setting fires to remove flammable vegetation between the flaming front and their control lines. Their great challenge is to restore good fire to biotas that hunger for it.

A fire crew mops up the Blue Cut Fire on Highway 2 on the way to Wrightwood, California. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The training that each group gets is largely worthless in the other’s setting. There are a few instances of cross-training, particularly in rural areas, but the prime example of a major agency that tries to cope with both types of threats is the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire. Its experience shows what fusing these two purposes can mean.

Mixing the Missions

Cal Fire began as the California Department of Forestry, a land management agency, albeit one with serious fire responsibilities. In 1974, under the pressures of postwar development, it became the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. In 2007, it collapsed that mission into Cal Fire, which operates like an urban fire service in the woods.

Decades ago, federal fire agencies gave up on suppression as a sole strategy. They recognized that the best way to control fire is to control the landscape, preferably through fire, and that eliminating all fires in places that have grown up with them only creates conditions that make wildfires worse. By contrast, for Cal Fire the urgency of fires rolling into communities trumps all other tasks. If the last firefight fails, it has to double down for the next one.

Today the WUI is exerting a similar transformation at the national level. It threatens to become a black hole in America’s pyrogeography, drawing federal land agencies – primarily the U.S. Forest Service and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management – away from managing fire as a means of managing land, and transforming them into urban fire-service surrogates and auxiliaries.

These agencies can and do help communities prepare for fires, but they do not have the tools, training or temperament to fight fire on an urban model. Cal Fire’s template is too expensive; moreover, it sucks resources away from managing fire well on the land, so it is too ineffective to serve nationally.

Turning the U.S. Forest Service into a National Fire Service may bring some relief to the WUI, but this would undermine the other missions in the agency’s charter, and ultimately weaken its ability to manage landscape fire. Already its fire mission is consuming over 50 percent of the Forest Service’s annual budget.

The fact that so many horrendous fires have started from power lines illustrates how fires mediate between the land and the ways we choose to live on it. Strengthening structures, bolstering urban fire services, treating WUI areas as built environment – this is where we will get the greatest paybacks.

In effect, we need to pick up the other end of the WUI stick. Think of these areas not as wildlands encumbered by houses, but as urban or exurban enclaves with peculiar landscaping. Defining the issue as fundamentally a wildland problem makes fixes difficult. Defining it as an urban problem makes solutions quickly apparent. The goal should be to segregate the two fire cultures and their habitats, and let each do what it does best.

Americans learned long ago how to keep cities from burning. And then, it seems, we forgot.

Republish this article

Our mission is to empower stakeholders and the wider public with high quality information, insights, and analysis on critical global issues. To help achieve this, we encourage you to republish the text of any article that contains a Republish button on your own news outlet.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines. Click to expand

In republishing any of our articles:

Ensure that you include a line of our HTML tracking code on every article you republish. This is a lightweight, efficient way for us to see the number of page views of each specific article published on our partners’ websites. This does not affect page layout, nor does it provide any information about your users, other web pages on your site, or any further data. By copying and pasting the HTML code in the box below, the tracking code is automatically included.

If, for any reason, you do not copy the code prepared for you, you must paste this code snippet into the end of the article in your CMS:

Note at the top and/or bottom of the story that it originally appeared on Water Deeply. This note should include a direct link to the original article and a sentence that offers the reader the opportunity to join the Water’s mailing list. Our recommended example is:

This should read : “This article originally appeared on Water Deeply. You can find the original here. For important news about water issues and the American West, you can sign up to the Water email list.”

Do not republish a photo without our written permission. Some sources don't allow their images to be republished without permission.

Do not translate a story into another language without our written permission.

We often republish pieces from our partners. If you want to republish a partner’s story, you must credit the original partner and include a “via News Deeply” link.

Note that News Deeply considers the publication date to be the date marked on the story, and is not responsible for any content that you choose to repost.

After republication on the partner website, if you make an accompanying post on social media referencing the republished article, you must include the relevant Deeply social media handle in such post. For example, (i) for Twitter posts this means adding the appropriate @Deeply tag such as @SyriaDeeply, @WaterDeeply, or @WomensGirlsHub and (ii) for Facebook this means tagging the appropriate Deeply page in your Facebook post.

News Deeply material may not to be provided, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, to third parties or affiliates for redistribution through those entities, unless you have received prior written approval from News Deeply.

You may not automatically or systematically republish any material from our sites; all stories must be chosen individually for republishing.

You may not sell our content or republish it for commercial purposes without our prior written consent.

We reserve the right to request that any partner ceases republication of our content, including but not limited to if the guidelines listed above not being followed.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact community@newsdeeply.com

We have updated our Privacy Policy with a few important changes specific to General Data Protection
Regulations
(GDPR) and our use of cookies. If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies. Read our
full Privacy Policy here.